In a series of forty-five short essays that constitute his book translated into English under the title “Damn the Novel: When a Privileged Genre Prevails Over All Forms of Creative Writing,” Sudanese-born poet and essayist Amr Muneer Dahab denounces the privilege granted to the novel, the literary genre that is treated by publishers—and viewed by the public—as superior to all others and is virtually guaranteed marketability and profitability, to the detriment of others.

In this series of posts, the prolific author shares excerpts from the book.

This week: Chapter 14

The Invention of Lying

The Invention of Lying is a 2009 American fantasy romantic comedy film written and directed by Ricky Gervais. The film stars Gervais as the first human with the ability to lie in a world where people can only tell the truth. The hero lied when the cashier in the bank asked him about his account balance because the computers went down. An idea (reaction) came to his mind that he should say he had $800 instead of the real sum of $300. He was in urgent need of the $800 to avoid being kicked out of his house. Thus, according to the film, the first lie in human history was begotten. Lying was so unlikely at that time that, even when the malfunction was repaired, the cashier had no doubt about the man’s honesty despite the computer’s confirming the false claim.

It wasn’t strange, then, that the sparkling temptation of lying kept seducing the hero’s mind. He came to discover that this new invention could be more useful than the pursuit of his personal interests. He might be able to save his friend from being arrested for drunk driving, to convince his neighbor not to commit suicide, and to help his mother await death (which her doctor coldly described as very imminent) happily, considering that what she was waiting for was a better life and not the infinite nothingness she was horribly scared of.

Our greatest concern in relation to the manifestations of the new invention would be how the hero (a scriptwriter in the story) was inspired with captivating ideas to revive his collapsing professional and, consequently, financial aspirations to the extent of leading him to invent lies. The special mission that was responsible for the failure of the hero’s career started when he was assigned to write a screenplay about the fourteenth-century boring life. He took advantage of the magical invention to embrace new perspectives of success that had been completely repressed before. Thus he could successfully rewrite the (hi)story of the fourteenth-century boring life anew—inventing a tale of astronauts who invaded the earth at that time and wiped out the memory of all human beings.

One of the most impressive gestures in the film is that it defers the idea of the invention (discovery) of lying to the modern age, maybe due to aesthetic requirements, including the double chances of finding paradoxes and the pleasure of overcoming the challenges of transcendence in the basis and details of the work. The fictional narrative does not oppose the probability that lying could have existed before the fourteenth century and then faded along with what was lost of human memory during the supposed space attack.

Practically, we know that the history of lying is far older than this. It is, after all, impossible to discover the exact start of lying in history, which is why the subject is handled through comedy. And if the story is a comedy blended with some seriousness (and innocence?) to track the history of the first lie, our objective in what follows is to consider novelistic lying in connection with the truthfulness that surrounds other literary arts, such as the essay, without wiping away the novel’s appeal and beauty. Still, we cannot deny the importance of lying in literature and art (and life?) in general.

Humans don’t have to lie to achieve attractiveness. However, the fact that cannot be ignored is that lying gives people more charm, and so is the case with the novel . . . and art in general.

Accordingly, some people should not be driven to rush to confirm that the fifteenth century witnessed the birth of the modern novel with Miguel de Cervantes and his Don Quixote, or even before, with the Greeks and others. In fact, the early emergence of the novel started with the new human invention of lying. The above-mentioned movie surprisingly does not only ratify the conclusion (about the correlation between inventing lying and the appearance of the novel) to the extent of complete matching, but it also goes further. It supports the idea that humans reached the conclusion that the novel is one of the noticeable fruits of the invention of lying. On the other side, the emergence of the essay as a creative art seems, through tracking its roots, somehow similar in the sense that it started with the invention of speech. So when essays incorporate some instances of lying, it is because of what sneaked into them after the invention of the novel as a new literary genre in specific and not after the invention of lying. The novel thereby is the first party to teach essays how to tell lies—a rare example of how a mother was spoiled by her daughter through the latter’s twisted demeanor.

The essay, as a category of creative writing, does not seem to be the offspring of the novel even in terms of quantity. It is hard for people like me to concede even supposedly that the novel can encompass all of the word arts, as its supporters claim. In this context, being guided by straight logic, we can say that the novel was growing till it exceeded the size of its mother—the essay. Here, we do not need to reverse the logic to justify the seemingly prospering offspring at the expense of its deep roots where it first saw the light.

A deliberate consideration of literary genres leads to the fact that the novel is the “prodigal” offspring of the essay in the sense that the latter is the true root of the unrhymed literary pieces before they became spoilt by lying and fantasy (the short story and the novel). This is like when a balloon swells and it looks beautiful and grand, though it contains nothing but air.

In fact, that is the flashiness of narrative art: readers need only prick to discover the (balloon) illusion they inherit from that type of writing when it comes to precious ideas and insight. But the essay is free from the bounds of such an illusion provided essayists do not shift into courtliness toward the reader through the fad of lying. This may take place with the insertion of some of the garments of fantasy and adulation in favor of narrative genres that are widespread in the writing market these days.

Indeed, the novel may have the right to be taken in the dizziness of vanity that usually accompanies literary pleasure acquired through the tickling sweet words and the nonsense of the funny imagination, stretching without constrains of rhyme or rhythm and invading (literary) markets. Therefore, the novel is the master in the literary scene, but not in a way that transcends the mastership of poetry when it comes to rhyme or rhythm as the criteria of the competition. Indeed, poetry excels in bringing about the most sublime expressions, along with the purest and sweetest conceptions. Besides, the seeming leadership of the novel cannot take over the authority of the essay, which affords precious thoughts fueling the readers’ imagination through the use of  expressions selected with much creativity and freedom in the fields of literature and creative writing as a whole.

The “official” statistics stated in encyclopedias and reference books advocate antecedence of the essay form compared to the novelistic genre. However, the other factor, more important than antecedence in terms of time, is the antecedence in fluency of expression and the ability to contain meanings away from the supremacy of “the new trend” that now dominates.